This invention relates to the field of computer systems. More particularly, a system and methods are provided for maintaining and synchronizing lists of content sources, channels, and/or other information.
Websites that serve content to users in different categories or of different types sometimes use an inflexible ordering of those categories or types, which the users cannot change. For example, a website may always provide multiple categories in alphabetical order of the category names, and a user cannot change that order to place their primary interest(s) first. Or, some websites will combine (e.g., interleave) content of different categories in a fixed way for presentation to the user, such as by selecting one item at a time from each category in a fixed order that the user cannot alter.
Even if a website allows a user to re-order content categories or types, the user's changes may not be replicated automatically across all of his or her devices. Thus, a user may take the time to adjust a list of categories exactly to his liking on one device (e.g., a desktop computer). If he then accesses the website from a different device (e.g., a portable computer), he may find that the categories again appear in a default order—that the changes he made on the other device were not replicated.
Or, if a site does allow a user to re-order his interests, and he does so on multiple devices, his changes may not be applied correctly. For example, if he reorders them one way on a first device that is offline and then again on a second offline device, when those devices are again online his changes may not be replicated in the correct order, in which case his most recent changes (which are probably the most accurate and relevant) may be lost.
Not only does this provide the user with a degraded user experience, but may also require the website to store and maintain multiple lists for each user (i.e., for each of the user's devices). For a site that services hundreds of thousands, or millions of users, retaining this much data for each user may not be feasible or may cause a significant expense and/or degrade users' experiences.